Are the majority of men assholes?

[chocolatesaltyballs22]

Firstly I'm not a man hater - I've been married twice and am still married. But increasingly I'm starting to think that the vast majority of men are arseholes or display some kind of arsehole behaviour. Example this morning, but there are lots more.

Swimming at the gym, all lanes empty except the one I'm swimming in. Bloke gets into my lane and does splashy front crawl, almost whacking me in the face with his big meaty arm every time he passes me. So I move lanes, because obvs he's more important than me and should have his favourite lane to himself. 🙄

After my swim I go for a quick jacuzzi - this is a 10 person jacuzzi with three men already in there taking up every available space with their arms stretched across the back of the jacuzzi as far as possible. So I approach thinking one of them will make space for me. Erm no - I have to force myself in and get dirty looks for daring to go into their 'man space.'

Contrast this with the very polite behaviour of MOST of the women who use my gym.

I'm happy to say my DH is in the small minority of men who aren't aresholes (although he's by no means perfect - who is?) But if anything happens to him I will happily remain single and sexless for the rest of my days rather than try to find another decent man. (Also worth saying my first husband was a narcissist and I wouldn't piss on him if he were on fire!)

I think a large part of this is statistics. If 10% are 'bad', there will be a proportion of society who never encounter them, and there will be others who just have the bad luck of only encountering them.

I've noticed (around here) women are far less considerate on the road, rare 'thank you's, lane hogging, 'owning' the road when dripping off kids etc. I'd imagine not all, just perhaps a local subset.

No more so than arsehole women.

Yeah I agree op. Most are bellends. I've said the same, if I split from my husband, I wouldn't bother again. By the time you cut all all the criminals, perverts, liars and cheaters, ain't many left really.
Agree about the comments from middle aged men too. It's worse if i put my actual profile photo on Facebook rather than a dog ( which it currently is). The comments are much more rude.

I have theories about driving but it comes down to the fact that women are actually not taught to drive as well as men and as a result tend to be more nervous, less able to adapt. Absolutely not a definitive statement, but overall, I think it's likely that women are not as confident/don't learn properly MORE often than men. The lane hogging, for example, is often not selfishness, but a lack of confidence in lane changing and/or a misguided belief that changing lane unless you are needing to turn is dangerous and/or lack of awareness of the road around you .

I have theories about driving but it comes down to the fact that women are actually not taught to drive as well as men and as a result tend to be more nervous, less able to adapt.

Is this really a 'fact' or just an unsubstantiated claim?

@TheCadoganArms I think it's pretty clear in the "I have theories" part of my statement? It's MY personal theory. Based on my own observed experience. Which, of course, is absolutely not in any way particularly scientific or genuinely extensive enough to count as fact. Hence why I said, "theory".

If I do ever get around to doing a post graduate degree in gender studies or sociology or something (which I've toyed with off and on for a long time) I'd be interested in actually conducting some real research on this theory of mine.

Valid hypotheses, which seems to agree with the 'typical' presumption about women. Men tend to be more reckless, risk-takers. Women stereotypically tend to be more methodical planners. I read this is true for certain ages at school where boys perform better because they'll 'guess' and blag, often securing higher scores in tests, whereas girls tend to only write what they know.

I've no idea if any of that is true!

Aaaa, @C1N1C But now, this is exactly why I'd be doing this research. In the context of driving, my feeling is that this is an example where, if I am right, women have been actively taught in a certain way as a result of various societal/patriachal norms. I feel like this is one that could actually be properly researched, with facts and statistics that would allow us to either prove/disprove my theory and make some deductions as a result.

And then, I imagine, we could then start to extrapolate. So, are boys genuinely just more willing to blag it, be risk takers etc? Or is it that as a society we are unconsciously teaching them this from day 1? Are there some lessons we can learn from my driving hypothesis (assuming it's proved true) that we could apply to other aspects of how we bring up and teach girls and boy?

Honestly, I feel I could revolutionise the whole issue of how the patriarchy is continued if I did this research!

I'd imagine the presumed justification that men are genetically predisposed to be risk takers will be slammed, but I'd argue this is perhaps the most likely reason. Humans were originally hunter gatherers. Men went out, had to judge distance, speed, space etc when hunting prey. Women were more organised and methodical planners, cooking, looking after kids etc. These qualities don't lend themselves to driving. (Don't hate me for saying this!!!)

More testing is required :)

I'm sure if this is true, we could 'engineer' progressively over successive generations these traits 'out' (or into) their respective genders... or maybe simply accept that these differences confer advantageous traits, and encourage them? Better to have one very good individual and use them for a particular task, than to have many 'average individuals?
...but that last suggestion flies in the face of traditional feminism.

Thinking out loud, not my actual suggestion for society!

I think it's pretty clear in the "I have theories" part of my statement? It's MY personal theory. Based on my own observed experience. Which, of course, is absolutely not in any way particularly scientific or genuinely extensive enough to count as fact. Hence why I said, "theory".

You claim to have theories based on the assertion that 'women are actually not taught to drive as well as men', the latter point you have presented above as a fact, which is why I questioned it.

Interestingly, statistically men are more likely to pass their practical driving test whereas women are more likely to pass the theory test.

@C1N1C I'll only respond once more as we're derailing! . But, "Humans were originally hunter gatherers. Men went out, had to judge distance, speed, space etc when hunting prey. Women were more organised and methodical planners, cooking, looking after kids etc. These qualities don't lend themselves to driving. (Don't hate me for saying this!!!)"

I'd say... bollocks. Society made it so that men would do the majority of hunting. In many cases, most likely for practical reasons - women pregnant, breastfeeding etc. Not because men were better at distance/speed/space judging by nature. This is a classic nature/nurture question. Also, organisation, planning etc would have been important for community wide hunting. Preparing the meet for transport and storage, ditto so men had these skills or could learn them.

I'm a great driver. Just saying..

@TheCadoganArms No, my theory is that women are not taught to drive well. That's my theory. And then my theory goes on to say that as a result, there are certain errors women are more likely to make when driving which may make them less good drivers and/or more irritating drivers etc.

In my original statement, perhaps I should have said, "but they come down to...." as I'd said "theories about driving". An incorrect use of a verb may have confused things slightly there.

I believe the “man hunts, woman stays home” theory isn’t nearly as accurate as it’s believed to be. There’s plenty of evidence of women hunting in prehistoric societies. The whole thing is a patriarchal myth, or at least a wild extrapolation.

Yep, more evidence around that women were accomplished hunters too. I think the simple hardship of hunter gather survival back then required everyone pitched in as it were, be it lighting fires, foraging for plants, fruit, eggs, honey etc or trapping and killing animals. I imagine on the odd occasion where a much larger or particularly dangerous prey was being hunted men might have taken a more prominent role purely on the basis that they could maintain a safe distance due to the ability to throw a spear/stone a greater distance.

I don’t think there is even sufficient evidence to support the last statement - men might be able to throw slightly further than women, on average, but not necessarily with similar accuracy, and how far a distance throw is really helpful when hunting game is debatable. Particularly when there is access to atatls…

The whole reason the “man hunter” thing is so widely believed is because it plays into the patriarchal prejudices of modern (and early modern / European medieval) society.

I suspect this is one of those things where practicalities or unconscious things societies do leads to things being seen as "fact".

So, 100% yes re women hunters and we're seeing more evidence of that and it's actually being properly studied, finally!

But, practically speaking, it's not unreasonable to assume that many women were NOT hunting as a result of pregnancy, childbirth and breastfeeding. So the narrative should be that men took this on because they couldn't do the childcare needed pre-and post-birth so this was the thing they could do. Arguably, they were LESS competent because they could ONLY do this thing, while women could do the children thing AND, if not encumbered by children, ALSO do the hunting thing.

But instead, the narrative shifted to be all about men hunting becuase they're bigger, stronger, more aggressive, more decisive, can measure distance better (argh)etc. And then, as you say, that completely feeds into a longer term patriarchal view of men as "protectors" and "aggressive" and all that bollocks.

I'm absolutely speculating on the last bit of my post but I don't think it is necessarily a controversial idea. A cursory look at the javelin world records show men throwing about 20m further then their elite women counterparts. An additional 20m range is a huge distance in the context of hunting prey. Sure, accuracy reduces the further you are trying to throw but if you are hunting as a group you just need that one 'hit' to disable an animal and then wait for it to sufficiently weaken from blood loss before going for the kill.

Hopefully an anthropologist will be along soon to set the record straight.

It’s certainly true that women wouldn’t be available for hunting during periods around childbirth.

I think there’s the big problem here that with prehistoric (and some more recent societies) we don’t really know what they did or didn’t do.

We are extrapolating from very limited evidence, and historically that evidence was not necessarily interpreted by experts (by which I mean the Victorian amateur “archaeologist” - who has the money to finance investigations but doesn’t have an training or standards to adhere to).

So a lot of what we believe, as a society, about ancient cultures, has been largely made up from limited evidence, interpreted by people who are very much a product of their own time (as we all are). So Victorian man sees evidence of hunting paraphernalia in a grave of a male and female and he presumed the male is a hunter and the woman stays home, because that’s what he’s conditioned to see.

And because of how academic circles worked at that time, his interpretation is largely accepted and disseminated as fact. Now we are a century and a half on and that’s the paradigm we are still trying to shift…

In a lot of ways, popular historical beliefs tell us more about the patriarchal nature of the 19th C than the cultures they are supposedly about.

WTF?

But at the extremes of range, you aren’t hitting with enough force to really wound an animal, even if you’re hoping for a slow death. I’d argue that greater accuracy minus the 20m extra range is probably more useful.

And with large game, one spear is very unlikely to do enough damage on its own, unless extremely well placed. You’d be better to take all available spears, including the women, get in close and kill it.

I wondered how long it would be before Nigel was mentioned.

Hopefully due to ‘equality’ both men and women will be - or does equality only work one way?

Obviously you will get maximum grief for posting in AIBU but in my opinion a lot of men are arseholes. Certainly every single man in my life, father, stepfather, husbands have been.
I've given up and have lived on my own for years. My male friends are all gay and we get on like a house on fire. But men on the whole are like untrained puppies.
My DS is ok but then I brought him up so he would be.